video tutorial

IGTV is the latest long-form video platform to come out. IGTV or Instagram TV allows users to upload 15 seconds to 10 minute long videos, in Portrait Crop. That means that video is vertical rather than landscape which has been the standard for video. Instagrammers are complaining about having to film extra video just to make content for IGTV but I am here to say that it’s not really that hard.

I have a simple way to edit your videos for IGTV that DOES NOT require you to shoot two versions of your footage. Check out my tutorial on how to film and edit video for IGTV using Adobe Premiere Pro CC and make sure to head over to Instagram and follow me to see more IGTV content.

Hey, what’s up? It’s Jerad, and I wanted to talk today about how to shoot and edit video for IGTV. That’s Instagram’s new, longer form video platform that allows most of us to upload between 15 second and 10 or 15-minute videos, depending on who you ask, and whose account you’re looking at. And then for those with more popular accounts, they can get up to 60 minute long videos.

So a lot of people have been talking about how to shoot for that, or whatnot. But for me, I do a lot of stuff on YouTube, and I wanna do a lot of stuff on Instagram TV, and sometimes it just doesn’t make sense to go and shoot two whole versions of a video. I’ve definitely tried that, and it makes for a lot longer editing process. Sometimes videos need to be longer than 10 minutes or 15 minutes. If I had one of those accounts that was accepting up to 60-minute videos, that might be cool, because then I wouldn’t have to worry about shooting different versions. But I think what’s important is that on IGTV, we’re used to … Well, on Instagram in general, we’re used to moving a little bit faster through content, and so maybe shorter form content that is 10 to 15 minutes or less is good, because of the attention span, and how fast we wanna move through Instagram. Do you really picture yourself watching an hour long video on Instagram? I think it would have to be from somebody who was a more popular influencer or at least, maybe a celebrity or something like that to make you wanna watch through that long a video.

So I wanted to talk, anyways, about how to shoot and edit video for that platform. Now, I’ve been kinda playin’ around with different camera setups. This is a Sony a7 III here, and I have it kind of set up for vertical shooting. This isn’t the best handle for it. I just kinda did this temporarily. I’ve messed around with the a6500. I’m kinda showing you a couple of photos here of some vertical video formats that I’ve kinda been messing with. But I’ve decided I don’t necessarily think it’s the best option to shoot vertically like this, to shoot everything vertical. IGTV, the quality of the video that they’re wanting you to upload is not 4K, it’s actually pretty close to HD. And so, considering the actual size of the image that they’re wanting you to upload, you might as well shoot 4K and then just crop in and get tighter in on your shot.

That’s essentially what I’ve been doing so far. I’m filming this in the standard format, 4K. Camera isn’t flipped or anything like that. So I’ve got all this extra room out here on the sides and so the only thing I have to focus on is just making sure that either the main action stays centered, or that I’m find with doing a little bit of post-production editing. So now, when I’m deciding whether or not I wanna shoot something and then put it up on YouTube, and then maybe put some of it over on IGTV or maybe a version of both, I’m essentially going to shoot like I’m gonna be shooting for YouTube. I’m just going to try to keep the action centered in the frame so that way, I can crop.

So to get the action in the center of the screen, you can also do some key framing and kinda move the video around within the constraints of the portrait view. And I did that in the first video that I uploaded to my personal IGTV. I did kind of this Father’s Day weekend recap, because we did a bunch of stuff on Father’s Day, and I had a couple of proud dad moments that weekend.

The first video that I uploaded, there has some shots from an obstacle course run that my kids did, and I had to kinda key frame a little bit and move that video around. You almost can’t even tell that I did it, because there was so much camera movement to begin with. So that’s essentially what I did there to get the action centered into that smaller, just that portrait. Because essentially, if any action was happening on the outer sides of the screen, you wouldn’t be able to see it. So just like I’m doing here, I’m filming, I’m in the center of the screen. I’m looking directly into the camera, which is what I would be doing if I was wanting to do a IGTV video. I typically would be talking to the person that is holding their phone. And so in that instance, it’s gonna be easy for me to edit that down.

So when I’m shooting B roll, any shots that I’m gonna shoot to kind of add to this video to make it more interesting that I’m gonna edit into the shot, I might consider keeping that action in one side of the camera frame. So whether I center that, which means I’m not gonna have to do anything other than just drop the video in, or if I keep it over maybe on the right third or the left third, then all I have to do is slide the video over, and I’m gonna show you exactly how I do that in post production. And you can film in 4K. This camera, most of the cameras, actually all the cameras that I use film in 4K and I’ll make sure to list those down in the description below on YouTube and if you’re watching this on IGTV, there’s a short link down below that you can go to to see my list of stuff. This is the equipment that I use, and I haven’t had to change a thing. I’ve just had to change my mindset in how I actually film, keeping in mind that now I’m not just trying to make it look good in a standard kind of landscape wider view, I also have to think about how that’s gonna look in portrait view, when somebody’s watching it on IGTV.

So let’s jump over to Premiere Pro. I’m gonna show you how my I have my video set up. We’re actually gonna be editing this video that we’re talking about. So the first half of the video you’re gonna get to see how I edited that and Premiere Pro so that I can have my YouTube version and my IGTV version, and that means doing all the edits only once. I’m not creating two separate timelines. Essentially, I am, but I’m not editing everything into two separate timelines. I’m only having to do any titles or any text onto screen once. I just have it all set up so that we only have to do the work once, yet we’re getting a landscape version of the video and a portrait version of the video. So let’s head over to Premiere Pro and take a look at how that’s done.

All right, so we have our project here, and I’ve basically gotten as much done as I can editing for YouTube. So you can see here, we’ve got our video. I’ve got some images that I’ve kinda put in here. I’ve got a couple of titles that I’ve put in. And so the video’s pretty much done. This section here in the middle is where we’re gonna put what you’re watching right now. And it’s gonna require a little bit of trickery to get all of the footage that you’re looking at now to actually look good on IGTV, but the main thing here is to show you how this footage that you’re looking at now can be cropped in easily.

So we have our sequence that you’re looking at right now. We’re gonna go head and create a second sequence by just going to sequence, and you can see I already have a preset here, called Portrait 4K UHD, but I can go into settings and show you exactly what I’m going to need to create. We’re gonna wanna choose custom. We’re going to want our vertical to be 2160. So this is if you’re shooting 4K, of course. If you’re not shooting 4K, you’re gonna need to figure out how to get to whatever your resolution is, just crop down. So I’m gonna type in 1215, and you can see that instead of having 16 by 9, I now have 9 by 16 footage. So essentially, this is the same. It’s gonna be the same height as the 4K footage originally was, it’s just gonna be a lot narrower, of course. We wanna make sure we choose square pixels. If you don’t have square pixels chosen, your ratio here isn’t gonna look right. And then everything else, you can just kinda leave default. And like I said at the beginning, saving it as a preset’s gonna save you a little bit of time. So I’ll go ahead and title this How to Film Edit for IGTV Portrait. Hit OK, and you can see here, now we have this portrait mode, black sequence ready to go.

Now the beautiful thing about this editor, is I can simply drag the sequence … This is the other sequence that we’ve already edited. I’ll just drag it and drop it right here onto the timeline. I’m gonna go ahead and keep existing settings. I don’t wanna change them. And so now I have basically a whole video ready to go. The only thing is you can see a few things are a little wider than they need to be, as far as the text goes. That’s something that I can adjust later. And then, let’s scroll to … Oh, here’s where we have the images. Those images, because of how I dropped them in, those images look perfect. Remember here, I basically cropped them center and then put a blurry version, so the images stacked. So let me show you exactly what this looks like. I’ll turn this off. So you can see, this is just a blurry version of the image maxed out at 250% exactly. And then on top of that, I put another version of the image. And you could even get creative here and actually edit this in Photoshop and drag it in if you wanted to. There’s a lot of cool ways that you can make that look even better. I just did it pretty quick, just so that we can see those images in there quickly. Obviously this is something I’m gonna have to resize, but …

And doing it this way, let’s go to this link. That’s a prime example. Let’s go to that link that I wanted to display there. So here’s that link. Obviously, this is too wide. It’s cut off, nobody’s gonna be able to see that link. I can resize this. So let’s just go ahead and let’s take that down to say, 80%, and then we’ll go and view it here. Look, it automatically adjusted it here. So the reason that that happened is because this timeline here, essentially was just put right here. So that’s great. That timeline is right there, and I have the ability to edit it in one place, and have it automatically update in the other location. So when I go and resize the titles at the beginning … So this title obviously is a little too wide for the IGTV version, or the portrait version, as we can see here, it’s a little bit cut off. This one’s gonna be a little wide, as well. I can just resize those and make them fit. Now, that’s gonna make the text a little small, maybe for the YouTube crop, or the landscape crop, but that’s okay. We’re just focusing here on making this as simple as possible.

Another thing that you can do is, we’ll just go ahead and create another version of the sequence that we already had. So I’m gonna go ahead and make that 2160 by 1215. Make sure that’s 9 by 16. Hit OK. So we have that new sequence. I can also just copy and paste everything, so I’m gonna hit command or control A, and then command or control C to copy it to my clipboard. And then I can come over here and paste it all in and everything is right in, and I have a duplicate of my timeline. So the only problem here … And see, it even actually resized it. So maybe this is a better option. The only problem is that this is not dynamically linked, so if I need to go back and make some changes to my original version, I’m now gonna have to go back and make those same changes here.

So this is just another way of doing it. You can either do it the dynamically linked way, and then maybe change your assets, the additional assets that need to be sized appropriately. Or, you can just copy and paste it into a whole nother … And you see the images look good, actually. This source URL is gonna be really tiny, so we’re gonna need to go back to that and increase its size to fit. So definitely, there’s pros and cons to both ways. But I wanted to show you that that’s a pretty simple way to do this. And then when you go to render out …

So this is another thing you gotta pay attention to. When you go to render out your IGTV version, so I’m gonna make sure that my timeline is selected. I’m gonna hit command or control M, depending on whether you’re on Mac or PC. You’re not gonna wanna go and change the render out settings to any of these presets, because it’s gonna override your portrait settings. Notice that if I go and choose YouTube 4K, it’s gonna mess things up. It’s gonna basically put my portrait video in the middle. You wouldn’t be able to upload this to Instagram, their IGTV without having issues. So you’re gonna wanna make sure and just leave it on match source high bit rate. I’ve got a 660 MB file here. I can then export this, and this’ll be ready to go. I can upload it directly to IGTV through the app, or through the web interface.

Alright, so I hope this video helped with figuring out what the best way is for you to create an edit content for both YouTube and Instagram TV, or IGTV. It is cool to build fun setups like this with cameras that are in portrait mode, and displays that are in portrait mode and all that stuff, it’s definitely impressive. But I’ve tried filming this way, and it’s very challenging, especially if you’re gonna be vlogging or something like that, to hold the camera when you don’t have that extra real estate for camera sway to film that way. So I highly recommend taking advantage of the fact that 4K video is more than enough footage, as far as the resolution goes for IGTV. So shoot all of your stuff in landscape, and then just crop for portrait. That’s the best advice I could give you.

So I’d appreciate a follow on IGTV or a subscribe on YouTube. You can check out some of my other content. My goal here is to help us all grow and get better at creating our content, at running our businesses, at optimizing our lives, and that’s kind of the variety of content that I’m putting up here on this channel. So make sure to follow along if you’d like. I look forward to seeing you in the next video, and take care.